July 4

Happy Birthday Marekani! (Isn’t it cute how close the Kiswahili word for America is to “  ‘merica!”  ?)

So I don’t have much to update you guys on since my last post. Just a few tidbits. Sorry, no pictures this time. The next post with be more visually appealing.

1.       There is some serious linguistic trading going on here. I’ve learned a fairly admirable amount of Kiswahili since I arrived. Maybe I can do a post in Kiswahili and English soon. Be on the lookout. I am also trying to pick up a few Danish phrases. I haven’t had very much success thus far. They’re hard enough to pronounce, let alone remember. Patience and persistence will prevail! I’ve decided to give back to this cultural potluck by teaching the Danes some Southern words. They think it is hilarious every time one of us lets a “y’all” slip. Immediately, they chime in with a storm of very awkward sounding “y’alls” and “yeehaw cowboys”. It’s pretty funny. It also doesn’t help that I met a gentleman from Arkansas that is staying at our training center. A conversation with him after any amount of beverage, and here comes Kristen O’Hara. So far the Danes know: y’all, supper, dagummit, dagnabbit, fixin’ to, howdy, taters, and yeehaw. Please comment with any more suggestions!

2.       We planned a very elaborate 4^th of July celebration – delivery pizza from a lodge across the street.  I think the aspect of sitting around a greasy and cheesy (cheese is surprising expensive and hard to find) pizza and enjoying each other’s company is very appealing at this point in the trip. No clean up required. Perfect. Unfortunately, the cheese here is kryptonite. Maybe it’s good that it is hard to find. When we all saw each other the next morning we vowed never to eat Tanzanian pizza again. Claus pretty much summed it up when he said “we will be able to lick our toilet seats when we get home and be just fine”. We capped the night by watching The Lion King on a projector on the TCDC grounds.

3.       Mama glory told us a pretty funny story about her friend, Happiness, the other day. So Happiness was visiting our home and left in the evening on a ‘boda boda’. AKA, a very fast, dangerous and cheap mode of motorcycle transportation. We are not allowed to ride on them during the program. Anyway, Happiness is cruising on the back of a boda boda when the driver sees a snake in the middle of the road. He slows down to maneuver around it, at which point the black mamba rears up and presumably starts attacking the boda boda. I don’t know the details, but the story ends with Happiness and the driver off of the vehicle (abandoned in the middle of the road) and a swarm of locals beating the snake with a stick.

4.       Power outages are pretty frequent at home. Last night I was putting my newly “favorited” squatting toilet to use when everything suddenly went dark. So I sat squatted there in lonely darkness until the power came back on. Luckily, one minute, tops.

5.       Besides the immense amount of volleyball we play (which is totally fine by me), we have started to find new ways to entertain ourselves between and after class. Simona has so graciously pointed out that I have an unusually high occurrence of gray hairs for my age. She enjoys sitting and searching. Claus is 31 and apparently has fewer gray hairs than me. Great. I prefer the word “silver”.